cannabisnews.com: Drugs, Guns and Money: Busted, a New Anthology





Drugs, Guns and Money: Busted, a New Anthology
Posted by CN Staff on December 06, 2002 at 19:23:59 PT
By Judith Lewis 
Source: LA Weekly 
Just about everyone hates the war on Drugs. Public officials and pundits at every point along the political spectrum, from the governors of New Mexico and Minnesota to the former mayor of Baltimore, have railed against its wastefulness; Detroit Police Chief Jerry Oliver blames it for exacerbating inner-city crime. William F. Buckley calls it a "plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year in public money"; Christopher Hitchens has labeled it "grotesque, state-sponsored racketeering." According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last year, three-quarters of the country believes the drug war is failing. 
Enter the words "end the war on drugs" into Google, and you'll get some 2,400 links, leading to the Web sites of religious groups, corporate-media sources and drug-legalization advocacy groups. You might also get a couple of "sponsored links" -- paid advertisements Google coughs up when you search for certain keywords. One evening I got two: an ad for Questia.com, where you can "research the War on Drugs at the world's largest online library," and another for -- http://www.mymeds.org -- advertising "Xanax, Valium, Lortab, etc. (Import a 90-day personal supply)." The irony is obvious, and clichéd enough to be comical: As Mike Gray points out in the introduction to his new anthology, Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords and Washington's War on Drugs, the U.S. government spends over $40 billion annually to promote the cause of a drug-free America, while Bob Dole appears on national television shilling for Viagra. Marijuana is non-lethal and non-addictive, but you can't talk about it on the phone; Xanax is known to be dangerously addictive and Valium is responsible for thousands of deaths by overdose every year, but both are readily available with the click of a mouse. "There has never been a drug-free society anywhere," argues Gray, also author of the 1998 Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out, "least of all in the United States where the dividing line between legal and illegal seems almost whimsical." This deep societal muddle-mindedness finds a parallel in public attitudes toward the control of illegal substances. Despite a majority vote of non-confidence for the drug war, the Pew study found that most Americans still defend its tactics. Over half of the people interviewed believed that arresting and locking up both drug users and dealers were the best solutions to our drug problems, even while our prisons fill to bursting with nonviolent offenders. Just as many poll participants agreed that more needed to be done to halt the importation of illegal substances, even though attempts to shut down the international market have only contributed to a more sophisticated network of international criminals willing to risk their lives to satisfy the lucrative American market. And so the drug war continues unabated, with the Bush administration -- for which legalization proponents once held out hope -- amping up spending on interdiction and enforcement and aiming to expand punishable offenses to include driving while under the influence of yesterday's marijuana. The DEA, in an effort to make wayward states comply with the federal ban on any kind of marijuana use, has stooped so low that it's raiding California hospices and carting away the terminally ill. "The War on Drugs," says Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, a think tank advocating drug-law reform, "just keeps getting bigger and meaner." Busted begins with an essay by T.D. Allman called "Blow Back," an earlier version of which ran in Rolling Stone last spring, just as the billion-dollar defoliation and harassment effort known as "Plan Colombia" was found to have resulted in a 25 percent increase in coca production. It's an apt beginning: Allman uses the blunders of Colombia as a metaphor for U.S. drug policy, which "trundles along, divorced from reality." The War on Drugs has become, he argues, an institutionalized arm of the federal government, "much like the Department of the Interior." Among the salaried careerists who stroll the manicured lawns of Arlington, Virginia, where the DEA is headquartered, Allman detected "no real sense that the War on Drugs was something that might actually be lost or won, and end someday." Most of the articles that follow in Busted, such as Joshua Wolf Shenk's 1999 Harper's magazine piece "America's Altered States: When Does Legal Relief of Pain Become Illegal Pursuit of Pleasure?," will be familiar to anyone who's been casually tracking U.S. drug policy. Oliver Stone's legendary, heartbreaking interview with the seemingly gracious Manuel Noriega ("I understand that the nature of your profession is sensationalist . . .," the general tells the director, "but I want to tell you there is another truth in this situation"), which ran in The Nation in 1994, is reprinted here. So is New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal's coffee-klatch phone call with Clinton's drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, which was picked up by Harper's after California voters approved the distribution of medical marijuana with Proposition 215. ("Where do we go from now?" pleads the perplexed and sympathetic journalist.) Gray's genius is not that he's dug up much new material, but that he's spliced the familiar information with lesser-known texts in a way that puts the issues in a persuasive context. Cast in the light of Allman's "Blow Back," for example, it's much easier to absorb Craig Reinarman's argument, from a 1998 issue of Het Parool, that the U.S. fears Dutch drug policy because the Dutch have demonstrated, with significant drops in both drug-related crime and drug use, that legalization works. After reading the accounts of European countries that treat heroin addiction as a health issue in Adam J. Smith's "America's Lonely Drug War," from Mother Jones magazine, the "Commonsense Drug Policy" of Ethan Nadelmann, with its calls for clean needles and methadone clinics, seems altogether moderate and wholesome. In the shadow of Shenk's treatise on the politics of pharmaceuticals, Dr. Charles Grob's "Politics of Ecstasy," written by one of the bravest and most outspoken proponents of clinical MDMA in the medical establishment, rings axiomatically true. In fact, by the end of Busted, which concludes with Lester Grinspoon, M.D., reminding us that, among other things, if cannabis could be patented and profited from, it would be legal by now, it seems clear that the solution to both the drug war and our national drug problem is, ironically, to legalize all drugs -- from heroin to methamphetamine to LSD. Let injection-drug users shoot up in clinics until they're ready to quit; let coffeehouses sell hash and therapists treat their posttraumatic stress survivors with MDMA-guided sessions. We could not be worse off than we are now, with the highest rates of drug abuse, drug-related violence and incarcerated drug offenders in the world -- not to mention severely abridged civil liberties. As Buckley himself once sagely observed, "Marijuana has never kicked down anyone's door in the middle of the night." And so Busted does what more political anthologies should -- it builds an implicit and convincing argument, not simply and straightforwardly, but by layering case after case until the evidence is irrefutable. It may not have a profound impact on government policy -- Busted is, after all, a book aimed at the believers. It's not likely that someone like Senator Orrin Hatch, who gets a half a million dollars every campaign season from the same pharmaceutical industry that bankrolled the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, is going to pick up Busted and experience some sort of lightning-bolt flash of sagacity that will induce him to stop sponsoring bills that extend the draconian provisions of the crack-house law to raves. But as a source of ammunition for opponents of the drug war, a manifesto of reason, and a document of where our drug policy stands now, Gray has compiled an invaluable and comprehensive reference. BUSTED: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords and Washington's War on Drugs - Edited by Mike Gray - Thunder's Mouth Press - Nation Books - 350 pages - $18 paperback.Complete Title: Drugs, Guns and Money: Busted, a New Anthology, and the Case for LegalizationSource: LA Weekly (CA)Author: Judith Lewis Published: December 6-12, 2002Copyright: 2002 Los Angeles Weekly, Inc.Contact: letters laweekly.comWebsite: http://www.laweekly.com/Related Articles & Web Sites:Drug Policy Alliancehttp://www.drugpolicy.org/Drug Crazyhttp://www.drugcrazy.com/Marijuana The Forbidden Medicinehttp://www.rxmarihuana.com/LA Weekly Independence Day Series http://www.freedomtoexhale.com/ds.htmA Debatable War on Drugs http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread10725.shtmlDrug War Disheartens Americanshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9092.shtml
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Comment #5 posted by afterburner on December 07, 2002 at 12:48:17 PT:
Human Faces.
I'm glad I read this article. The title is off-putting, but the anthology idea has persuasive merit. We need this kind of variety at Cannabis News, and we need your pepper too, p4me. JSM, I agree that appealing to the emotions will create the action we need. Look at the WAMM raids: for a while we got sympathetic press coverage, but it faded away.Meanwhile, in Nevada the story of one indiscriminate drug user who had pot, and other drugs, in his system and a record of dangerous driving killed a newspaper editor. This tragedy put a negative human face on the legalization debate. "One thing that the other side did was to humanize the issue better than we did," Armentano agrees. "When they roll out victims of drug abuse, like that editor of the Las Vegas Sun who was rear-ended at a red light and killed by a driver who had marijuana in his system ... they put a human face on potential victims that could arise if this law was passed. And I don't know that the (legalization) side did a good job of showing the human victims that are harmed by the drug laws." --Why Do Many Nevadans Favor The Drug War? http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/14/thread14824.shtml We need more videos like "Crimes of Compassion" (medical cannabis) and movies like "Bowling for Columbine" (gun culture) to put a sustained human face on the suffering of medical cannabis patients and of those non-violent users caged for using a God-given plant.ego destruction or ego transcendence, that is the question.
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Comment #4 posted by JSM on December 07, 2002 at 08:08:12 PT
Logic
If we learned anything from what happened in Neveda, it has to be that logic will never end this war. Prohibitionists will do anything to perserve the statue quo and no matter what information we bring to light on this absurbity nothing will change until we too start appealing to the emotions and people become afraid, mad, or just plain fed up with the waste and hypocrisy. Otherwise, everything will remain as it is today. Logic does not create action, only emotion will. It is time we started using this to our advantage.
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Comment #3 posted by Patrick on December 07, 2002 at 07:55:13 PT
Speaking of Lies p4me
I just finished reading an interesting book entitled "The People of The Lie/ The Hope for Healing Human Evil" by M. Scott Peck, M.D. Simon Schuster 1983. The book doesn't mention or discuss the WOD in general. However, there is a chapter that examines "Group Evil" using the Mylai incident in Vietnam as the subject for examination. This article touches on quite a few of the psychological examinations made in that chapter of the book especially considering the following excerpt…The DEA, in an effort to make wayward states comply with the federal ban on any kind of marijuana use, has stooped so low that it's raiding California hospices and carting away the terminally ill. "The War on Drugs," says Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, a think tank advocating drug-law reform, "just keeps getting bigger and meaner."Or you could argue more and MORE EVIL. EVIL simply being the opposite spelling of LIVE in more ways than one! The key finding I think in Peck's book is the association between evil and the LIES that are told.
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Comment #2 posted by The GCW on December 07, 2002 at 05:28:17 PT
About the only war worth fighting is
THE WAR ON THE WAR ON DRUGS.WAR ON THE WAR.Now that's a war We can win! (about the only people the prohibitionists have stopped from using cannabis, is other idiots [I don't know about that one]?Hmmm)How many black men does the Federal Gov. have to cage to stop white people from using drugs?Jesus Christ, My main Man, broke the law in order to heal the sick. These(urine)suckers would cage My Man."...And FOOD (Our Father's [self described]good creation) which sustains man's heart...", is not acceptable to the Man of Lawlessness. VIVA URINEGovernment prohibitionist protagonist. PROTAGONISTS is a bulls-eye.The lucritive prohibitionist government cage is the worst known side effect of cannabis use, SO CUT IT OUT.In light of the Truth, society has a duty to effectively demand Re-legalizing cannabis, reducing the risks of using cannabis, to it’s citizens.How would You describe the idiot that cages a human for using a plant? The false prerequisite belief that cannabis is evil, insures urine suckers get rich. The "false prerequisite belief" (another bulls-eye), is brainwashing The Holy Spirit of Truth into the devils advocate of submission, believing the Table of the Lord is defiled.The Green Collar Worker
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Comment #1 posted by p4me on December 06, 2002 at 22:40:05 PT
Great stuff there, pal.
I wish the guy would quote Judge Gray when he says that you could not do a worse job if you tried considering the Drug War Folly. Except it is far more vicious than just folly. With out a drug war how could we kill people/peasantsa for being people/peasants in Columbia. Poison the Rain Forest is kind of opposite the Save the Rain Forest that started about the same time as the CSA of 1970. The guy is way to soft and stops well short of saying Prohibition Kills. People, animals rain forest trees- kill them all, Walters and fascist friends say. Well, hang them all for murder.And my GD for the day, is Goddamn, tell the American people about the wickedness of The Schedule One Lie. It's a whopper and someone should tell everyone they can. I'll give the guy a B+ and that is generous because he did not even use the word, "Fascism."I tlked earlier about buying $4.20 of gas everytime and of course kerosine too. But look how happy knoxxy is getting his medicine. How about the people that want the 80% to be heard and act on the behalf of the sick and dying that suffer because of the Schedule One Lie. All Congress has too do is quit lying and the medical dilema is solved. But no, those bastards live to lie and they should be hung for their arragonce, silence, fascism, and murder. No shit.
So, the next time you buy gas you can send a message. They know we are here, but they don't know how pissed off we are. We should show them.1
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